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10,000 'Cubbleyous' and counting

10,000 'Cubbleyous' and counting

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By Mark Newman
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MLB.com |

It all began on April 20, 1876, when player-manager A.G. Spalding threw a 4-0 shutout against Louisville. That was the first victory for the National League franchise now known as the Chicago Cubs, and no one then could imagine that one night far into the future, 132 years later almost to the day, a "closer" called Carlos Marmol would retire a player way out in Colorado in the 10th inning to clinch win No. 10,000.

In honor of that 10,000th victory for the Cubs franchise, here is what 10,000 of those white flags with a blue "W" would look like raised to the top of the Wrigley Field scoreboard. They are also known as "Cubbleyous" and you will find all of them here in this article. Trust us, the Microsoft Word character count is always right. It is not exactly Faulkner, but they go on emphatically forever. That is kind of how baseball feels -- forever, longer than us, with the focus mostly on the W's.

Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse called many of them and each one made them extremely happy. Phil Wrigley and Bill Veeck welcomed fans into a Friendly Confines where you could see a result like that. Fans watched far and wide, summer after summer, to get that good feeling with a result like that.

A great many of those Cubbleyous happened in the daylight. Lights were installed at Wrigley in 1988, and after a rainout against Philadelphia on that first evening of Aug. 8, the first official night "W" at Wrigley was a 6-4 victory over the Mets on Aug. 9.

Even if the best Cub teams were in the earliest of the 1900s, the intensity of that W production picked up in the second half of the 20th century. That is because Major League Baseball expanded in 1962 from a 154-game regular season schedule to today's 162-game campaign. It wasn't immediately a bonus for Cub fans; the team actually went from 64-90 in 1961 to 59-103 in 1962. That was the first of two 100-loss seasons (also 1966) in club history, but we aren't here to talk about L's.

We are here to talk about 10,000 W's. Like all of those accumulated from 1906-1910, when just one more W in the 1908 season would have meant five consecutive triple-digit victory seasons. It remains one of the greatest five-year runs in Major League history, complete with four pennants and two world championships. It included 116 W's in 1906 alone. No tribute to 10,000 W's is complete without mention of Frank Chance, who managed that team, drove in 71 runs and made 1,376 putouts at first base.

A "W" just makes you feel better. It is the best feeling, in fact. Everything seems right in the world when your team wins. You are another day closer to the possibility of a "W" that clinches something important, maybe even a world championship. Just think how a "W" would feel this year if your team was in the last game played.

There is a reasonable chance of that, too. Right now, the Cubs have so many W's in this season that they lead the NL Central. They probably will need to be in the 90s to get back into the postseason this time, so every one counts. They always do.

To find the first of those 10,000 W's, you have to go way back to 1876. Ironically, the Cubs were actually known as the White Stockings then. Spalding threw a shutout, and that 4-0 victory over Louisville got it all started.

Now there are 10,000 W's in the history of a proud franchise. That is a whole lot of happiness. That is a whole lot of fun at the ballpark, a lot of beautiful afternoons and evenings spent in the bleachers, grandstand and rooftops. That is a whole lot of Cub players like Aramis Ramirez and Derrek Lee high-fiving themselves in a conga line just as Andre Dawson and Mark Grace did after a typical victory.